The Wisdom of Crowds Read online

  He leaned back to survey the results. Those words had always worked magic before, conjuring obedience from thin air. But now, suddenly, the spell had no effect. “I order you to bloody halt!” He doubted the crowd could even hear him over their own clamour. He could hardly hear himself over his own thudding heart.

  Earlier that week, Lord Marshal Rucksted had addressed their regiment. Told them they were the last line of defence. Told them failure was unthinkable, retreat impossible. Rithinghorm had always admired Rucksted. Excellent beard. Lot of dash. The very style of officer he wanted to be. But the man had looked positively dishevelled. Beard in disarray. Now Rithinghorm knew why.

  People continued to flood from the buildings on the other side of the moat and into an ever-thicker press at the end of the bridge. Breakers! Traitors! Here, at the very gates of the Agriont! And so many. He could scarcely credit it. They were starting to move out onto the bridge itself. One in particular, leading the way, some dirty bloody peasant woman with her skirt tucked into her belt so her pale, sinewy legs showed, waving a knife, screeching words he could scarcely hear. Something about someone’s son.

  “Inconceivable,” whispered Rithinghorm. If he had read it in one of his sister’s storybooks he would have dismissed it as a fantasy.

  They had to be kept away from the gate. They had to be cleared from the bridge. They had to be taught a damn lesson.

  He pointed towards that shrieking woman.

  “Shoot her!”

  “Sir?” said Parry, blinking. Damn, his mouth was dry. Kept having to lick his lips.

  Captain Rithinghorm came close to point through the arrow-loop. Close enough that Parry could hear his breath echoing in the narrow chain room. Close enough that he could smell him. He must wear some kind of perfume. Hint of lavender. He pointed down, white with anger. Down towards that laundry-woman.

  “I said shoot her!”

  Parry licked his lips again. Bow was ready. He’d made sure of that. Or his hands had done it for him, following the old routine. He sighted up, nice and careful. Strangest thing. She reminded Parry of his mother. She used to tuck her skirts in like that, when she was mopping floors.

  “Shoot, then!”

  Parry wanted to follow orders. Always followed ’em before. But his hand wouldn’t let go the string. The woman was coming closer, screeching away. That reminded him of his mother, too. Folk were starting to follow her example, edging out onto the bridge, towards the gate.

  He licked his lips. Again. Just didn’t seem right, to shoot that woman.

  Slowly, Parry lowered his bow.

  “What are you doing?”

  Parry took the arrow from the string and, not sure what to do with it, put it behind his back. “Doesn’t seem right,” he said.

  Rithinghorm seized him by the jacket. “I gave you an order!”

  “I know.” Everyone was looking at them now. “I’m very sorry, sir.”

  Rithinghorm started to shake him. “Are you a damn traitor?”

  Parry could only swallow, and blink, and grip that arrow tight behind his back, and shake his head. “I… don’t think so.” He honestly wasn’t sure. “Just… doesn’t seem right.”

  Rithinghorm threw him back against the wall, jaw muscles squirming on the sides of his taut face. “Sergeant Hope!”

  “Sir?” said the sergeant.

  Rithinghorm pointed a stabbing finger at Parry. “Kill this man!”

  Sergeant Hope stared down at his drawn short-sword, a long slit of light from one of the arrow-loops making the broad blade glint in the shadows. He’d have followed his old captain into hell. He had done, out in Styria. But not this little fucker. This little bastard with his fine accent and his pale face and his thin fingers and his bloody perfume, ordering good men killed. Ordering the citizens of Adua shot at. It came to him that he had more in common with those Breakers chanting outside on the bridge than he did with Rithinghorm. They were just people. People who wanted to be heard. People who wanted enough to get by, while others had so much more’n they could ever need.

  Twenty years, he’d been doing as he was told. Never seen another way. But just like that, sharp as fingers snapped under his nose, he decided to stop.

  “No,” he said.

  Rithinghorm gave a strange sort of hoot, mouth and eyes wide with surprise, when the short-sword slid into his well-pressed uniform jacket. Hope dragged the blade back and Rithinghorm plucked weakly at his shoulder, cheeks puffed right out. Hope shoved him away, lifted the sword and hacked it into Rithinghorm’s skull. Blood spattered. It’s always a surprise, how much a man holds.

  He blinked at his captain’s corpse for a moment. He felt light-headed. He felt light all over. As if a fully laden pack had been snatched from his shoulders.

  Through the slitted windows he could see the bridge was a solid press of people. He could hear the gates creaking below under the pressure.

  He turned to the men. They were staring at him. Parry and all the rest. So young, they were. Good lads. Could he ever have looked that young, when he first joined? They didn’t know what to say. What to do. Hope didn’t know, either, but they had to do something.

  He pointed towards the stair. “Guess we’d better open the gates.”

  Smiler heard the clonk of the bar, the rattle of bolts, then the gates gave under the pressure and people surged forwards like a river in spate through a burst dam. Folk pressed against him so tight, he struggled not to prick ’em by accident with the spike on the back of his war hammer.

  There was a maid there, bonnet skewed across her face. There was a man might’ve been a wheelwright, or a cooper. There was a fellow looked no better’n a beggar. Citizens of Adua picked up that day, citizens of the Union picked up in their march across Midderland, all mixed in with the First Breakers’ Regiment, men like Smiler who’d fought in the wars in Styria, then in the bread riots in Keln, then struggled in the mills in Valbeck, then been armed with Angland steel and marched to free ’emselves from tyranny. Now all that sacrifice and struggle were finally bearing fruit—the Great Change, come at last.

  They tumbled eagerly up the tunnel into the rotten heart of the old order. Into the Agriont, grand buildings rising up on every side. Into the Square of Marshals where once, as a boy, Smiler came to watch the Summer Contest, and screamed his lungs raw as Jezal dan Luthar beat Bremer dan Gorst in the final.

  There were swords here today as well. A double line of soldiers strung across the square, crooked and hastily gathered, shields and weapons at all angles, an officer shouting in a broken voice.

  The Breakers charged. Didn’t need an order. They couldn’t have stopped even if they’d wanted to, there was so much shoving from behind. The whole People’s Army at their backs. Every ground-down worker in the Union. But Smiler didn’t want to stop. He wanted to smash this whole corrupt place. These grasping bastards who’d sent his friends to die in Styria, to die in the mills, to die in the cellars. He wanted to burn away the rot and make a country for its people.

  Smiler picked out a man to charge at, peeking over the top of his shield with desperate eyes. He let go a roar of hate, of joy, of triumph, the flagstones flying under his feet, the brothers surging to freedom all around him.

  Their shields crashed together. They struggled and strained, and Smiler got a glimpse of the man’s bared teeth and his wide eyes then suddenly the pressure was gone and he was stumbling forwards, and he saw Roys had swung his halberd and staved the man’s helmet in.

  It was a slaughter, really. The royalists were already breaking, and they scurried away towards the great statues at the far end of the square, and men charged after them, whooping and screaming, leaving Smiler to stare down at the dead soldier with the dented helmet.

  Came to him then how easily he could’ve been in that line, if things had worked out just a little different. If he’d stayed in the army when they came back from Styria, instead of walking away in disgust. There was only a coin-toss between him and these corpses.
/>   “You’re a hero!” And a woman with a strong chin and her hair bound in a red scarf craned up to plant a great soft kiss on his jaw. “You’re all bloody heroes!”

  The soldier blinked down at her, his helmet skewed, surprised, she thought, but not disappointed. So long since Adnes last kissed a man she didn’t know how to tell. But it wasn’t a romantic thing so much as joy at having hope again. Or maybe it was a romantic thing, ’cause he grabbed her around the back of the head and kissed her on the mouth, and she clung on to him, which was uncomfortable on account of the hardness of his breastplate, and there was a great warmth right through her and she was sucking greedily at his tongue which tasted of onions, and a fine taste it was, too.

  She never would’ve dreamed she might kiss a stranger like that, but it was a new day and the king’s men were beaten and all the old rules were gone, and the sun showed through again and made the soldiers’ armour glitter, made the little puddles on the flagstones sparkle. Was this freedom?

  They were dragged apart by the flood of cheering people then shoved back together, carried across the Square of Marshals and up the grand steps of the Lords’ Round, through the inlaid doors. Adnes stared up to the dome, high, high above, and around her, in the vast and heavy silence, hundreds of people who never thought in their lives to pass through those doors did the same.

  She looked at the gilding, and the different-coloured marbles, and the rare woods, and the suns stitched into the cushions on the benches, and the stained-glass windows that showed scenes she didn’t understand. A bald man holding out a crown. A bearded man with a sword standing over two others. A young man lit by a ray of sun as he stood up alone from a crowd. The spotless grandeur of the place. Nothing could be further from the farm she’d left when the People’s Army came through, where they’d slept on straw on the floor of a shack, and worn their hands to the meat, and been treated by the local lordling like they were less than dirt.

  Well, they were the masters now.

  They carried Risinau in on a gilded chair they must’ve torn from some chamber, some office, some hall. Adnes grabbed at a leg of it, one in a forest of hands, helping it pass, and Risinau laughed, and they laughed, and the joyous crowd cheered as they carried him bobbing down the aisle between the curved benches, and set him on the great table.

  Folk had got up to the public gallery and were singing and clapping, the echoes of their joy bouncing about the great space and bringing it alive like it couldn’t have been since that dome was raised. There was a flower girl up there and she had a sack of petals and was throwing handfuls down, fluttering like butterflies through the shafts of coloured light to carpet the tiles below, and Adnes had never seen so beautiful a thing. Made her think of her husband’s grave, and her sons’ graves, down in the wood where the wildflowers grew, and that brought a blur of tears to her eyes. So much joy and so much pain together she thought her chest would split with it.

  “You have brought the dream to life, my friends!” roared Risinau, and there was a cheer so loud it made Adnes’s teeth rattle and her ears ring and her heart throb.

  “Risinau!” people squealed. “Risinau!” And Adnes made a great sobbing, meaningless wail, reaching out towards him.

  “Equality, my brothers! Unity, my sisters! A new beginning! A country governed by all, in the interests of all. You will say on your deathbeds, with a smile, that you were here! The day the Lords’ Round was made the Commons’ Round! The day of the Great Change!”

  She was crying, and all about her men and women were crying and laughing, all at once.

  It was the day their dreams came true. The day their new Union was born.

  The soldier caught her hand, and there were tears on his face, too, but he was smiling. He’d a fine smile, she thought. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Who cares a shit?” And she dragged his helmet off so she could push her fingers through his sweaty hair, and started kissing him again.

  Ettenbeck slipped from a side door of the Lords’ Round and into a narrow street behind the building. He had thought he would be safe in there. Where could be safer than the very heart of the Union? But now the Breakers were inside. He could hear them cheering. He could hear them crashing through the buildings all about him!

  Perhaps this was how it had been when the Gurkish invaded, and the Eaters broke into the Agriont. He remembered his uncle telling him the story, his watery eyes fixed on the far distance, as though at horrors beyond imagining. But these were not cannibal sorcerers, not inhuman and unknowable demons, not the wielders of forbidden powers. Just ordinary people.

  A window shattered in the Commission for Land and Agriculture and a desk came flying through, crashing to the ground not far away. Ettenbeck could feel the sweat running down his scalp. Leaking out of him as if he was a squeezed sponge. It took every vestige of self-control he had not to break into a desperate sprint. The walls of the palace compound might still hold firm. Perhaps if he could make it there—

  “There’s one!” He heard footsteps clapping from the buildings. “Stop him!” Now he ran, but not far. Someone caught him under the arm and threw him down. A flash of a bearded face, armour that looked new-forged. He was dragged up again by the elbow. A strange gang. Like the people you might see at one of the cheap markets. Only furious.

  And Ettenbeck realised that ordinary people can be utterly terrifying.

  “Where you going, fucker?” growled a man with a scar on his chin.

  “There’s no escaping the people’s justice!” squealed a woman and slapped him across the face.

  “We’re in charge now!”

  He could hardly understand their grinding accents. He did not know what they wanted. Did not know what he could possibly give them. “My name is Ettenbeck,” he said, for no reason that made any sense. They shoved him onwards. His cheek was burning.

  There were other prisoners caught up in the crowd. Administrators. Bureaucrats. Clerks. A couple of soldiers. Herded like animals. Prodded along with spears. A grinning coachman was flicking at them with his carriage whip, making them howl and whimper. Ettenbeck knew one man’s bloody face, but his name had gone. All their names had gone.

  “Profiteers!” someone was screaming in a broken voice. “Speculators!”

  A dark-skinned fellow was being kicked along the street, and he would stumble up, and be kicked down again, up, and down. Ettenbeck thought he was an ambassador from somewhere. Kadir, maybe? A charming, cultured man. Ettenbeck had heard him speak very movingly to the Solar Society about closer cooperation across the Circle Sea. Now they had knocked his hat off and were spitting on him.

  “Bastard!” snarled a man in soldier’s clothes who had stripped his jacket off, his shirt spotted with blood. “Bastard!” And he stamped on the ambassador’s head.

  Something hit Ettenbeck on the side of his face and he fell. The ground cracked him hard. He wobbled up to his hands and knees. His jaw was throbbing. “Oh,” he muttered, blood pattering on the cobbles. “Oh dear.” A tooth fell out of his numb mouth.

  He was caught by the elbow again, dragged up again, pain shooting through his armpit, and sent stumbling on.

  “Profiteers!” a woman shrieked, spit spraying, eyes bulging, pointing at him with a rolling pin. “Speculators!”

  “He’s one o’ those Closed Council bastards!”

  “I’m just a clerk!” Ettenbeck’s voice was a desperate squeal. It was a lie. He was one of the senior under-secretaries for Agricultural Taxation. How proudly he had murmured the title to himself when he received the promotion. His sister would finally have to take him seriously. How he wished now he had never even come to Adua, let alone to the Agriont. But you’ll buy nothing with wishes, as his mother always loved to say.

  He kicked and twisted as they dragged him across the little square in front of the Land Registry Building towards the fountain. An ugly thing, a wide, waist-high stone bowl of water with a twisting mass of spouting stone fish rising from the centre. It was by no mea
ns improved by a corpse draped over the rim, arse in the air and the pointed toes of fashionable shoes scraping the flagstones.

  Ettenbeck realised they were dragging him up next to the body. “Wait!” he squealed, and he caught the stone basin, spray splashing in his face, thrashing desperately, but there were hands all around him, one of his legs was lifted, the other shoe falling off as it scuffed on the ground. Someone caught the back of his head.

  “One last drink at the people’s expense, Councillor!”

  And they shoved his face into the water. Through the gurgle of the fountain he heard shouting. Singing. Laughing. He fought his way up, just for a moment, gasped in a breath, saw the mad crowd surging on towards the House of Questions. They shook swords and spears in the air. One had a severed head spiked on it, bobbing obscenely over the mob. Absurd. Like a cheap prop in a badly produced play. Except it was real.

  He was shoved down again, into the fountain, bubbles rushing.

  No More Trouble

  Broad did what he’d been doing ever since they locked him in this cell. He paced back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It was only five steps from one side to the other and those were small ones, but he paced anyway, and while he paced he chewed over and over all the stupid things he’d done to land himself here. Sometimes he kicked the wall, or dug his aching fist into his sore hand, or slapped himself hard enough to hurt. Seemed he couldn’t help hurting people. With no one else to hand, he hurt himself.

  He’d promised no more trouble, then let himself get sucked in yet again. High Treason would be the charge, he was guilty as hell and there was only one punishment. Savine wouldn’t be saving him this time. She was locked up, too, somewhere in this buried warren of a place. She couldn’t even save herself.

  He made a promise, then. If, by some undeserved twist of fate, he wriggled free of this, he’d live for Liddy and May. “No more trouble,” he whispered, and he ground his forehead against the rough stone wall. “No more.” He swore it. One more time.